William Grows Up
by EldawenEmileia
Summary: Snapshots of important times in William Darcy's life growing up and coming into his own, up to a certain fateful moment. Lizzie Bennet Diaries.


**1984  
**"It's a boy," William S. Darcy is told. He smiles, extremely proud to have a son, and squeezes his dear Anne's hand, beaming at her. Both have unshed tears glistening in their eyes. They had early on decided that if it were a boy, he would be named after his father and grandfather. "Our dear William," Anne says.

**1988  
**Computers are ridiculously expensive, and William, not quite yet four years old, doesn't understand that. But what he does know, is that his normally even-tempered father displays an unusual amount of excitement over this new technology entering their home. He will later remember crawling up on his lap, sitting between his father and this strange new device, staring in fascination at the screen. It is to be his first memory.

**1989**  
His parents sit him down. They look happy. William isn't sure what is happening, but their excitement makes him excited. He knows something important is happening, too. They tell him he is to be a brother. They don't know yet whether he will have a brother or sister, but they are too excited not to share the news with him.

**1989**  
He wanders into the living room and sees his mother crying. He doesn't know why. In all his five years of life, he has never seen her cry before. "Why are you crying, mommy?" he asks. She puts a fist to her mouth, choking back a sob. A heartbeat passes before she reaches for him, gathering him into her arms, rocking back and forth, just clinging to him. "Mommy, are you hurt?" he tries again, feeling a little scared, not knowing what he could do to care for her, but wanting to try, just the same. "Will—oh, William—" she begins. She seeks for the right words to tell him, and prays for the strength to be able to speak. "Your... our... You're... Your little brother or little sister is an angel in heaven now. We won't get to meet him... or her... now. I'm so—" she chokes back another sob, "sorry, William," she finishes, as she clings even more tightly to him. He doesn't quite understand what being a brother meant, or angels, but he grasps that his mother really needs him right now, and he hugs her tightly in return, doing his best to help this person who means so much to him.

**1991**  
He is nearly eight years old, and he understands things a little better now, when his mom and dad once again sit him down... his mom has begun to show, after all, and he might not be the most social kid in school, but he knows enough to know that there is a difference between "pregnant" and "fat," and he knows his mom hasn't been getting fat. Still, there is apprehension threaded through his parent's excitement, and suddenly he remembers events from a little under two years ago, and things click for this boy, already seemingly older than his years would indicate. "Am I going to be a brother?" he asks. His parents confirm it. They're doing everything they can to make sure all goes well this time, and they add, "We're pretty sure you're getting a sister. Things soon get a little confusing when he is hustled off to his Aunt Catherine's house, but soon become much clearer when he goes to the hospital to see his new baby sister. "Her name is Georgiana," his dad tells him. Will wrinkles his little upturned nose. "That's a long name." His dad laughs (he can laugh now) and tells him, "Well, we were thinking we could sometimes shorten it to 'Gigi'."

**1994**  
His dad keeps talking about this new thing called "Yahoo!" and how it was going to change everything. William doesn't know exactly what it is, but files away the name in memory.

**1995**  
Toy Story comes out in theaters. William likes the tale, even though he's a couple years older than Andy. But he actually finds that he is at least as interested in how the technology of the animation made things seem so much more lifelike. Of course, being in the filming industry, his dad _does_ talk an awful lot about innovations in the field.

**1996**  
Twelve-year-old William decides he wants to be "just like Dad." He starts asking him more questions about what he does at work. Of course he'd been inside the Pemberley Productions building plenty of times, but mostly it was just to see his parents in their offices. But now his dad takes him on a _real_ tour, explaining more about what happens in each department. William is fascinated.

**1997**  
Mr Wickham, long-time friend and coworker of Mr Darcy, suddenly passes away of a heart attack, and his son, George, becomes something of a permanent fixture in the Darcy household.

**1998**  
Now the buzzwords are "Google" and "iMac" and "Windows 98." William soaks it all in, but his dad does more than that. His dad sees the future, and re-brands Pemberley Productions as Pemberley Digital. Through Pemberley, William also gets a taste of both the iMac and Windows 98, when his dad sometimes gives him little tasks to do at the offices after school. It's a busy time at Pemberley, as they work to bring the company successfully through the transition.

**2000**  
They all laugh at how worried they were about Y2K, but for William, one of his more notable achievements that year was acquiring his driver's license... even if it meant he had to chaperone his eight-year-old sister to swim lessons. At least George, who was now like a brother to him, could come along on those. George also really liked swimming. And really, even if his sister could be a little... energetic... at times, he still loved her, and would do anything for her. Including being her chaperone.

**2000-2002  
**On top of his regular high school classes, he spends his junior and senior years taking additional classes at the community college, as well as working part time at Pemberley (he still can hardly believe his good fortune in that his dad actually _pays_ him to work there, and that he can count it as an internship). Most guys his age are busy chasing after girls (or other guys, like his childhood friend Fitz), but William doesn't have time for that.

**2002**  
William graduates high school with a 4.0 GPA, but declines the role of valedictorian. Public speaking scares him. One of his graduation presents is the iPod, rapidly gaining in popularity. His extra college classes have also earned him an Associate's degree. He transfers this to UCLA and seeks a Bachelor's degree in business, with the ultimate goal of achieving an MBA. He sees his dad when he flies down for business meetings at Pemberley's LA offices, and continues seeking advice from him, and discussing the direction Pemberley is taking. He has never wavered in his desire to join his dad at work.

**2003**  
Apparently it's a college thing to call your classmates by their last names. At least, that's what Bing tells him. William Darcy was not aware of this particular trend prior to college, but he shrugs it off. Bing is really a friendly person, somehow working his way past William's – Darcy's – social awkwardness, and Darcy soon finds himself answering as easily to his last name as to his first. Another college trend, he finds, is women throwing themselves with varying degrees of subtlety at him – or rather, his money. It bothers him some, but his focus is on education, so he tends to ignore them, even when Bing manages to coax him to some kind of social gathering. Meanwhile, Myspace begins to take off, and his regular discussions with his father review whether this medium has anything to offer in the production and dissemination of content.

**2004**  
_February_  
Darcy is neck-deep preparing for winter term finals. Having transferred in, this is already his senior year, though he is not yet 20, and he is looking forward to having only one term left before beginning work on his Master's degree. He is so close, he can almost taste it. But then he receives a call one evening. Gigi. Crying. "What's wrong, Gigi? Tell me." He knows something is terribly wrong, but he doesn't know what, and she can barely speak. "Mom—" she starts. He interrupts her, "What about Mom – what is it?" He has a sudden flashback to when he was five before his brain interposes the logic that such a situation is completely unlikely here. "And Dad—" Gigi chokes out, her voice shaking in a high-pitched tone. "Dad...?" he echoes faintly. Suddenly another, deeper voice replaces hers on the line, though it too is clearly emotional. "William. Man." He recognizes his friend Fitz's voice. Fitz frequently played "house guardian" when his parents went out of town. "There's no easy way to tell you this, bud. But your parents—" Fitz pauses as though fearing to go on. "Their ski trip..." he trails off again before continuing, "They... they're gone." A sniffle is heard over the line. "I'm so, so sorry, man." William sits in stunned, unbelieving silence for a full minute. When he finally speaks, his voice is hoarse and his words nearly unintelligible. But life never moved on by denying reality, so he skipped over the "It can't be," and went straight to the "What? Why? How...?" The answer came back, "On their way up the mountain. A truck was coming down around a sharp curve too fast, hit a patch of ice, and slid into their car head-on. I am so, so sorry," Fitz repeated. William unwillingly pictured his parent's last moments. "Did they suf—" he started to ask. "They never felt a thing, I'm told." Small enough comfort, but in this gut-wrenching moment, he clung to it as a life raft. "I'm coming home. I'm needed there." "But school—" Fitz interjected. "—can wait. I... will figure it out." William finished.

_March_  
The funeral and the memorial services are both over. He suddenly has a host of responsibilities, more than he'd ever dealt with before. But he has help. Fitz is fully established as caretaker for Gigi in his absence, and George, though a senior in high school, can help, too. The board would run things at Pemberley for him until he graduated, though he made sure they would inform him of proceedings, and not make any major decisions without him. He had made arrangements with his professors for an extension on his assignments, but now he must finish them, and catch up with the new assignments for spring term. He didn't quite manage to keep up his 4.0 grade average his last two terms, and he berated himself for it, knowing how much more than ever he needed to prove his worth as a man of business.

_Summer_  
He juggles the beginning work of his MBA with picking up more responsibilities at Pemberley. He has made it a goal to get the degree in the minimum amount of time. He knows that the sooner he has it, the sooner it will increase the faith of long-time employees of Pemberley in his ability to lead and manage as effectively as his dad, even as young as he is.

_Fall_  
George reminds him about the trust fund set up for his college education, and requests to handle it himself. Darcy isn't sure he can trust George to do that, but his busy schedule has taken its toll, and this solution means one less task on his plate. And he does want to trust George. Meanwhile, Facebook is beginning to take off, and Darcy hears about it, but hardly has the time to look into it. He misses his conversations with his dad.

**2005**  
It's been a year, and today is the ground-breaking ceremony for the Anne F. and William S. Darcy Memorial Hall. He looks forward to seeing it completed. Now halfway through his graduate program, he is surprised one day when George comes to him looking for money. While this isn't the first time George asked for money, the amount being requested this time is significantly higher than usual. Darcy wants to know why. It takes some prying to get out the whole story, and when he does, he is coldly furious. He has been working his tail off, trying to manage school and work and his role as his sister's guardian and brother, while George had the gall to waste four years' worth of money in less than one. He can't believe his _friend_ could have been so thoughtless and irresponsible, not to mention so disrespectful to his father's memory. He shuts George out of his life. He doesn't need that kind of influence. Or hurt.

**2006**  
Early in the year, now two years going without his parents, the memorial hall is complete, and he presides over the ribbon-cutting ceremony with Gigi. Those two years have seemingly been a lifetime, but Darcy is rewarded for his hard work with his MBA, and feels fully confident in his field. Now he can devote more time to care of his sister and his company. One recent development from the previous year was YouTube. He's not sure how, just yet, but he has a feeling that this medium has great potential for dissemination of content. He feels similarly about another emerging technology, rapidly gaining in popularity: Twitter.

**2007-2009**  
Slowly Darcy begins to prove himself every bit a capable CEO. It takes some convincing of the board, but he eventually carries through his initiative to assign a team to devoting their time and energies to brainstorming unique and forward-thinking methods of content production and dissemination. His youth causes some hesitation in long-term board members, but this progressive image and methodology is truly a legacy of his father that Darcy wants to continue to promote.

**2009-2011**  
William is proud to see his sister graduate high school and enter college. In addition to swimming, she finds she loves art and design, and he encourages her in those pursuits, knowing that Pemberley is a company that could use graphic designers, and thinking how he would like it if she someday worked for the company. Programming has also begun on a second iteration of a smart phone app, the first one having proven rather... buggy and unsuccessful. But the programming team has convinced him that they've learned a lot, and technology has really advanced to meet their needs, and they think they can make a go of this.

**2011**  
Late in the year, as Gigi is in her junior year, also at UCLA, William decided to pay her a surprise visit. Work meetings had been shuffled around, and he found he had some spare time. To his great surprise and dismay, he found that Gigi had fallen in with George Wickham. She hadn't mentioned him for so long after that fateful year, he thought maybe she had forgotten him. Clearly he was wrong. But he knew George only cared about money, so he offered him a bribe, about which George apparently had no qualms in accepting and running off. Never having been in love, William didn't understand his sister's heartache, but he did what he could for her, in spite of her railing against him. People got over these things, right?

**2012**  
Though her anger has somewhat abated, Gigi is still mad at him, and Bing, his old college friend, has taken up a home in a small town, about halfway between LA and San Francisco. Darcy decides to take him up on the offer to come visit him. A break from some of the pressures of home would not be unwelcome, and would give Gigi more time to cool off, too. Even if he did feel obliged to go with Bing to a stranger's wedding soon after arriving, at least it wasn't as though he'd have to dance or otherwise make a fool of himself in a social setting, where he knew he was sometimes awkward and uncomfortable...


End file.
